I have an orange sweatshirt that I love wearing on weekends for yard work etc. I walked into a Home Depot one afternoon recently and I can't tell you how many people came up to me asking questions. "Where's hardware?" "Do you have wood stain?" On and on...

Look like you belong and no one will ask questions. I like the geocaching and if I ever have occasion to try to find a geocache where there is too much foot traffic to not look suspicious -- and I need to poke around some bushes or something -- I don a high-vis green safety vest and no one has ever said a word.

When i worked retail it wasn't uncommon to have a bold shoplifter totally fill up their cart and try to casually leave the store. I'd say 90% of the time they're obvious and caught red handed but there's a few that don't get noticed until the second they're just outside the store.

I seem to recall there was a case where some criminals, in order to steal a load of servers for the data, actually had a truck signwritten with the name of a fake haulage company, had company uniforms made, and turned up with pallet loaders. Nobody asked for identification.

When i worked retail it wasn't uncommon to have a bold shoplifter totally fill up their cart and try to casually leave the store.

This exactly, or simply walk out the front door with their stolen items in a Kmart shopping bag, not bothering to pause, just acting entirely normal. The dumb shoplifters were the ones who tried to stuff clothes in their coats, they always got caught.

And per this guy, if someone wearing a Kmart vest with a nametag had headed out the front door with a couple of air conditioners in a cart, I doubt I would've said anything, assuming they weren't being all skeevy about it. We went through staff so quickly that I wouldn't have thought twice about it. At a store as large as Home Depot I doubt many employees can keep track of who's even on the floor.

When i worked retail it wasn't uncommon to have a bold shoplifter totally fill up their cart and try to casually leave the store

These kinds of stories can be seen as low level cons. We like to think of con-men as running complex schemes, but it's all about building confidence. You can do it with a uniform, or just do it with an attitude.

A guy I worked with years ago (when we were in our 20's and broke all the time) ate for free at a local chain coffee shop for months. The first time was an accident: he ordered a fancy sandwich and iced-coffee drink, went to sit down and eat it, realized he hadn't paid and yet nobody said anything (there was a quirk in how the counter/cashier were situated.) So he did it again every day for months before they caught on (and then only made him pay for that one meal, though they probably suspected him of a lot more.) The fact that he ate in the store most of the time made it seem legit, so nobody thought twice.